Tuesday, August 18, 2015

Should colleges be required to report rape to law enforcement? The argument is unworthy of serious debate

The question of whether colleges should only report rape to law enforcement at the whim of the accuser is not merely absurd, it is unworthy of serious debate. That there is debate about the issue is an indication of the power of extremists on matters of college sexual assault.

If a student were brutally beaten, would anyone suggest a college should not report it without the accuser's consent? By failing to report, innocent students are put at risk. Rape is no different. The oft-repeated meme that requiring colleges to report to law enforcement will keep some victims from reporting is, of course, the worst kind of politicized bullshit. As Joe Cohn of FIRE has explained: "Requiring institutions to report allegations to police doesn’t require the complainant to cooperate with investigators." (In other words, it's like any other crime.) "If the alleged victim doesn’t want to talk to the police, he or she doesn’t have to. But without notifying police at all, authorities are left in the dark, without the opportunity to offer support and services to complainants, or discover other evidence to prosecute the crime."

To allow colleges to not report plays into the dangerous stereotypes that rape is a "different" kind of crime and that women are helpless children who need to be coddled.

It also sends out the unmistakable signal that college sexual assault really isn't a "crime-crime" like assault and armed robbery and murder. It's just a card college women ought to be allowed to play if they feel like it. Is that really what they want?

And, of course, almost everyone agrees that colleges are unqualified to investigate and do justice when it comes to thorny issues of she said-she said sexual assault.

So why are we even having this debate? We are having this debate because the usual suspects who dominate the public discourse on all things gender have created an empire of their own on college campuses, with the help of an extremist Department of Education that shares their philosophy. There, they have have created their own little pro-accuser system of "justice." What does that mean? You see, it has long been the ultimate goal of radical feminists to shift the burden of proof in sexual assault cases from the accuser to the accused (to force the accused to prove sex wasn't rape any time an accusation is lodged -- something that flips due process on its head), and they have been able to achieve this on campus. This goal of shifting the burden of proof is part and parcel of their extremist belief that we should automatically believe the accuser--and that belief is the animating impulse behind their hostility to the due process rights of the accused when it comes to sexual assault.

Make no mistake, once they are certain they've "won" on college campuses, they will try to bring their peculiar brand of "justice" to a courthouse near you, and that's a good reason to kill it now, before it gets bigger and bigger.

To involve law enforcement in college sexual assault accusations threatens the very foundations of their empire, and that is why they will do anything they can to oppose it. That these policies hurt innocent men and fail to protect innocent women is beside the point to these zealots. Those are not their concerns.

All persons of goodwill need to stand with the legal scholars who have condemned the extremists. And now, finally, as the cases of expelled men work their way through the judicial process, judges in a string of judicial decisions have joined the growing chorus.

Right will always win out in the end. Sometimes, terrible things need to happen first to awaken the good people to stand and say, "Enough!" We've now reached that point.